CHAPTER 62: Thursday

POV: Avalon Pierce

The federal courthouse on Golden Gate Avenue looked exactly like a building designed to make you feel small.

Which was probably the point.

Avalon had been inside it before. He knew the lobby, the security line, the echo the floors made when the building was quiet.

But today wasn’t quiet.

Reporters filed outside, not the mob that had followed the early deposition hearings but enough. A cluster near the entrance with cameras and the patient energy of people waiting for something they’d been told was worth waiting for.

He walked past them without stopping.

Selene was beside him, Margaret was just behind and Thomas had arrived separately, which was intentional and they both knew it.

Catherine was already inside.

She was sitting on a bench in the corridor outside the courtroom with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight and her face arranged in the composed expression he’d known his entire life. She looked well considering she just got discharged. 

She stood immediately she saw him.

They looked at each other for a moment in the way they’d been looking at each other lately. 

“You came,” she said.

“You’re testifying for us,” he said. “Where else would I be.”

Something moved across her face briefly as she sat back down.

He sat beside her.

Not close but beside her.

Selene settled on his other side and the three of them sat in the courthouse corridor while lawyers moved past and clerks carried files and the ordinary machinery of justice went about its work completely indifferent to what any of this meant personally.

“How are you feeling?” Selene asked Catherine.

“Nervous,” Catherine said. Which surprised Avalon. She didn’t admit to nervousness easily. Had most of his childhood performing certainty as a parenting strategy? “The prosecutor briefed me this morning, they want me to speak specifically about the period after your father died. Things I knew and what Whitmore said to me directly.”

“He spoke to you directly?” Avalon said.

“Once, six months after the accident.” She looked at her hands. “He came to the house, and he was very polite and sympathetic. He said he wanted to make sure I was managing well, that if I needed anything I should call him.” She paused. “And then he said something about your father having been a man who sometimes let principle get ahead of practicality. That it was a shame and he hoped I would be more pragmatic.”

The corridor was loud around them and quiet between them.

“He was warning you,” Avalon said.

“He was warning me. Yes.”

“And you understood that.”

“I understood it completely.” She looked at him. “And I was pragmatic for thirty years, I was exactly what he asked me to be.”

Avalon said nothing.

He thought about a woman in her thirties with a young son and a dead husband and a powerful man standing in her living room using the word pragmatic as a threat dressed as condolence.

He thought about the choices people made in impossible moments.

He’d spent a lot of time lately thinking about that.

The hearing lasted two hours.

Avalon sat in the gallery beside Selene and watched Catherine take the stand.

She was composed in the way he recognised, the stillness she could produce when it mattered but underneath it today there was something different. Something he hadn’t seen before on a witness stand or anywhere else.

She wasn’t performing composure.

She just was composed.

Because she’d decided what she was going to do and she’d done it and there was nothing left to manage.

She told them about the visit, about the word pragmatic and thirty years of understanding exactly what that visit had meant and choosing to survive rather than act.

Whitmore’s lawyer cross examined her for forty minutes.

She didn’t crack nor did she deflect but answered every question directly and when she didn’t know something said she didn’t know rather than reaching for a convenient answer.

Avalon watched her and felt something shift quietly in his chest, something close to forgiveness even tho he is not there yet.

The judge took thirty minutes.

When he returned his expression gave nothing away which Selene had told him meant nothing except that the judge was good at his job.

He read his ruling in a flat tone of someone who had learned that to prevent the room from reacting before he’d finished.

The motion to suppress was denied.

The evidence stood.

The prosecution would proceed.

The room exhaled.

Avalon sat very still.

Selene’s hand found his.

Across the room Whitmore sat at the defense table and looked at nothing in particular with the expression of a man who had spent thirty years being careful and had finally run out of road.

Outside afterwards the reporters found them immediately.

Diana handled it with prepared statement and no questions. 

Catherine came out a few minutes after them and Avalon crossed to meet her.

She waited.

He didn’t have a speech. “Thank you,” he said.

Catherine looked at him.

Her eyes filled with tear that she refused to spill.

“Don’t thank me,” she said quietly. “Just let me try.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

Then he nodded once.